Kavinay
We all think we're Leonard of Quirm, but it's far more likely we're at best Ponder Stibbons.
I don't know what it is, but the Industrial Revolution books just don't seem engaging to me.
“The human body only has so much air in it. You have to make it last. One plate of beans can take a year off your life. I have avoided rumbustiousness all my days. I am an old person and that means what I say is wisdom!”
“Sooner or later, every curse is a prayer.”
This isn't really a children's book which actually makes it the perfect book for children. Terry Pratchett's touch with the ongoing education of young witch Tiffany Aching is clever and delightful.
This is an easy book to like. Schreier is a good writer and his access to key figures in the industry is exciting for a behind the scenes on big moments in gaming. Indeed, the first couple chapters he covers are interesting as broad surveys into the perils of game development such as scope creep, marketing and the crunch.
But the longer you go on, the more you get the sense that his attempts to cover the crunch and similar dysfunctions of project and business management in the industry are more an apologia for insiders with survivor bias than a critique of toxic work environments.
In that respect, I found myself getting more irritated as the case studies went on, since every developer's inevitable deadline push and 100hr work week just felt banal and awful rather than a triumph of creative passion. I'm not in game development (thank goodness!) and it's largely because the norms that go relatively unchallenged in this book work really well for select game devs with credibility and power, whereas the common employee is treated like garbage and told that this is for the great good. I doubt this was Schreier's intent, but the sum total of the book reads more like an attempt to spin complete management dysfunction as normal operating parameters.
The first time Cline used my nostalgia for exposition, Ready Player One, it was novel. It worked. But retreading the same technique of storytelling via mining geeky references just feels masturbatory in Armada.
Coates is equally depressing and inspiring. Depressing because his view is somewhat bleak: there is no easy solution for white supremacy. Inspiring because simply articulating the manner in which people are racialized and taken advantage of over and over again is itself a triumphant act.
I wonder if this is why people of colour appreciate Coates: he can describe the many little and great concessions we make every day without the faux-inspirational rhetoric of a political agenda of progress. For Coates, and frankly many of us, nothing is all that surprising about modern race relations. From the Civil War to Trump, the practice of white supremacy is generally pretty straightforward. From the case for reparations the first white president, Coates keeps pointing out the same things: institutions make it really easy to entrench white power and excuse the disenfranchisement of blacks. The apologetics for the poor white working class that elected Trump are really nothing new or surprising. They're part of tradition and that tradition is one of white supremacy.
What I found unexpectedly interesting in this book is Coates' personal thoughts and development through the eight years of the Obama presidency. It's not just growth but also a realization that expectations and reality are never linear or progressive.
A good first act, but you get the sense that this was a short story or novella that was dragged out a bit. I didn't really care about the murder plot.
Also, the interesting bit with Cheung–I could swear it was an homage to Baxter and Clarke's The Light of Other Days, but Sawyer's novel actually came out a year before that.
“The Sorrows of Odin the Goth”is a classic of science fiction. The other stories vary and can get a bit cringe worthy at times given pulp-era norms (Manse “being kind” to an ancient prostitute he considered ugly). But this is still formative work. Anderson is so crafty that you can easily miss the fact that the Time Patrol itself is cause of almost every crisis it resolves!
So many books about the experience of racialized people are written essentially for a white audience. What a delight that Reni Eddo-Lodge speaks directly to the constant frustration of having to explain and defend the banal ubiquity of structural racism to a majority that reflexively shirks from the idea.
If you are a person of colour, read this book. It doesn't purport to solve racism or provide whiteness 101 training. Rather, it's likely the first time you will see your thoughts and frustrations at living within the bounds of white supremacy articulated so clearly and passionately by a superb writer.
Kieron Gillen gets it.
Somehow, he can make characters that fit in the OT canon but also completely reinvigorate all the tropes that 40 years of Star Wars has mined to death.
Dr. Aphra is quite possibly the best thing to come from the new Disney canon and I say this even after absolutely loving the Gillen's Darth Vader run and Soule's brilliant Lando series.
“Divide and rule,” “The Raj, “ “indentured servitude.” If you're of Indian descent, you've probably heard your older family mutter these words with disdain yet never really grasped the sheer horror of British terror that informed their disgust.
There is a rising tide of apologia for colonialism. The ilk of Niall Ferguson sincerely believe that it wasn't all that bad–and they'd be right if all you had to go on were their fantasies of colonial uplift. This is where Shashi Tharoor shines. He simply lays out the best possible excuses for defenders of Britain's treatment of India and then demolishes each nostalgic delusion with historical context, records and facts.
Ultimately, Tharoor's positive argument is pretty simple when you get past all the Imperial gloss: Indians were people. Their lives mattered just as much as yours and mine–but this could never be the case during British rule in India.
I've read Fleming and watched the movies, but the best person to write a Bond story might just be Warren Ellis. Even pages of exposition in M's office are engrossing.
If you don't already love Kamau, you probably won't enjoy this book. It's rambling and generally all over the place–like an oral history of how Kamau got progressively more woke. But honestly, that's why the book makes sense. The essays interspersed throughout are just so fabulously on point such as this wonderful take on the importance of Apollo Creed:
In the 1970s, he was the rare Black character in the movie who was clearly way smarter than the lead white character in the movie.
The unholy triangle:
racism/drug war
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Asset forfeiture Erosion of castle doctrine (no knocks)
This is not a bad story. Scott Snyder write Batman with a combo of fun and grimness that most can't match. That being said, there's something familiar about the conclusion and that's the convenience of everything wrapping up in a manner similar to his previous Batman run. It's as if he does such a great job laying out the experience of Batman that he can't quite figure out a way to make sense of the story. Case in point: Harvey/Two-Face's conclusion just rings hollow.
KGBeast though! Man, I'd love to see more of Snyder's take on this old favourite.
My hands are warm, I hold my mouse tight, my eyes squint at the Goodreads form.
Argh. I wanted to love this book. I love Thrawn and Zahn and still think the original Thrawn series is the best Star Wars prose we've had to date. While there is nothing wrong with this book, Zahn remains an able writer, there just isn't any real development of titular character. It's a weird sort of origin story in that Thrawn does not change over the course of the book. Sure, his human apprentice goes full circle, but I really couldn't care at all about that. We don't really get to know Thrawn as anything more or less than what we already got in the previous EU or Rebels. Ironically, the most well-developed character in the book is Governor Price!
This is not a bad book, but it's also not a particularly impressive one either. Thrawn is a novel that seems more like a necessary work to establish the credentials of the Grand Admiral in the new canon, rather than a truly engrossing take on the character. Why Zahn could not be unshackled to do both is what puzzles me.
This isn't just a useful book for baseball or sports analytics. Law's approach to making sense of data in the applied field of baseball points out the many flaws and pitfalls of any analytical pursuit. Cases of “managing to the stat” or simply relying on counting stats to the exclusion of useful context are profoundly atavistic, but Law keeps pointing out how these lay approaches persevere and thrive despite more coherent methods.
I generally don't get much out of sports analytics books–they tend to be introductory primers to many of the concepts analytics nerds are already deeply familiar with. Where Smart Baseball excels is that Law does more just than show the advantage of a contextual number over a mere counting stat. Instead, he spends a great deal of a time exploring how the fallacies that went into creating myths like the relevancy of a Save or Pitcher Win were inculcated into fan and even subject matter expert's understanding of the game. It's this constant refrain about the emergence of error in commonsense stats that makes the book an extremely useful polemic against the use of shallow approaches to big data and broader analytics.
My God.
Imagine there's a country out there that asserts it can assassinate it's own citizens based on executive power alone? Further, it can assassinate that citizen's children with impunity, even when that child is a citizen too.
That country is America. That executive wasn't just the Bush Administration or the current batshit one. No the President at the time was Barack Obama.
Scahill takes what might be merely an anti-state polemic in another journalist's hands and crafts an amazing collection of stories on the war on terror and all it's unintended consequences. This isn't a Bob Woodward special, but rather like Chomsky in the field with teeth. From the blowback of the US radicalizing allies and it's own citizens, to the sheer lack of concern for civilian casualties and the assumption that American black ops are unquestionable, Scahill just crushes any hope you can have in the competence of US anti-terrorism let alone the state's moral authority in that war.
The investigation behind the Gardez Massacre alone–a botched JSOC raid of innocent civilians which was then covered up via carving bullets out of butchered women–is stunning. https://theintercept.com/2016/06/01/pentagon-special-ops-killing-of-pregnant-afghan-women-was-appropriate-use-of-force/
The Raymond Davis “incident” reads like a John Le Carre novel except it exposes US officials for lacking the spymaster's knowing sense of moral ambiguity and humanity.
America's use and embrace of extrajudicial killing is pure nightmare fuel.